. . . I believe that the earth man has
already touched -- sometimes gently and sometimes brutally --
can sustain his advancing civilization if he applies his science,
his technology, and his genius to the challenge of going back
over what he has touched and ameliorating his mistakes. Hardly
a tenth of that earth is still essentially uninterrupted by his
technology. This is the wilderness, an increasingly rare thing
that civilizations old patterns of growth can overrun swiftly,
but to little avail. Man can tear the miracle of wilderness apart
but he cannot reassemble it, and the vestige that too few people
know about is all that men will ever have. It contains answers
to questions man has not yet learned how to ask.

Man is prolific enough to explode across
the land, but he can only do so at the expense of the organic
diversity essential to the only world he can live upon. When
beaver populations explode, the beaver overload their range,
become neurotic, lose vitality, and starve. Mankind has a range,
too, and it has a maximum carrying capacity consistent with a
good life -- a life with enough resources on hand to serve a
restrained population and to spare nations from a final quarrel
over them.

Man needs an Earth National Park, to
protect on this planet what he has not destroyed and what need
not be destroyed. In this action, all the nations could unite
against the one real common enemy -- Rampant Technology. Here
might be rescued, for the improved men we should hope will be
born in centuries and millennia to come, the natural places where
answers can always be sought to questions man may one day be
wise enough to ask. . . .